Research by Kuhl and colleagues suggests that linguistic experience affects
the internal organization of vowel and consonant categories. The present
cross-language experiments test the role of language experience on the internal
structure of American English and Finnish phonetic categories. Adult native
listeners of Finnish and American English were tested with both native and
non-native stimulus sets. The synthesized stimulus sets included a contrast that
was phonemic in both languages (/r/--/l/) as well as one that was phonemic in
only one language (/v/--/w/). Stimuli were modeled after native speakers of the
respective language. The stimuli were: a grid of American English /r/--/l/
tokens varying in F2 and F3; a grid of Finnish /r/ tokens varying in aspiration
and trill amplitude; a grid of Finnish /l/ tokens varying in F1 transition
length and F2; and an American English /v/--/w/ continuum varying in F2.
Listeners gave category goodness and identification judgments for individual
stimuli based on their native categories, and then rated the similarity of
stimulus pairs. Multidimensional scaling analyses were employed to model the
internal structure of these categories. The results suggest that internal
structure is dependent on language experience. [Work supported by NIH.]